DESCRIPTION: It is proposed to develop research query tools for hospital based data. It speaks to the need for aggregation of data to answer health services research questions versus individual data items necessary for clinical care. The proposed metalanguage will be database independent and will serve as an intermediate language to develop SQL queries of the database. The researchers are cognizant of the need for data confidentiality. They plan to implement their query language on two different clinical databases so that they will have experience with the universality of their language. They propose an intermediate language which may avoid quadratic work in accommodating multiple sources and targets of translation. The plan is to test queries generated by the intermediate language against native SQL requests.